Are San Diegans so lazy that they’d rather get in a car to go walk in a pleasant place than do nothing to improve the streetscape at their front door?

Leslie Ryan thinks so.

She’s the head of the NewSchool of Architecture and Design’s landscape architecture program, and she’s on a crusade to make our streets shady and our cars second-class citizens.

She’ll expound on her ideas at a Wednesday forum, “The Public Realm: The Reemerging City Building Framework,” at the downtown school and cosponsored with Walk San Diego.

“I think maybe sometimes our sun and weather make us a little too lazy in San Diego,” Ryan said. “Walkability is not getting in the car and going to a place where you can walk. It’s what’s outside your door, on the sidewalk, that’s so compelling and makes you feel so good that you want to go out.”

Case in point: Ryan’s neighborhood of North Park.

“I can walk for blocks and blocks and never be in the shade of a tree,” she said.

It’s not that San Diegans hate shady streets.

“You can see in other cities where this happens -- trees arch over the streets and create tunnels of green,” she said. “We have this in some of our communities -- typically La Jolla, Coronado and some old parts of La Mesa. They have wonderful places to walk.”

But in the city of San Diego, she said, building and zoning rules seem to disadvantage pedestrians and favor delivery trucks, fire equipment and other space-hogging vehicles that bump up against the low-hanging limbs of shade trees -- and so street crews trim them back to keep them out of the way.

Or else palm trees line the streets, That makes for a nice, tropical look, but the only ones enjoying the shade are the rats hiding in the crowns.

Ryan is big on jacarandas, not necessarily because they’re the city’s official tree but because they originated in Brazil’s dry rain forest, need relatively little water and are suited to San Diego’s clay soil. (The staining blooms are a mere but beautiful nuisance.)

“Cities like San Diego were built with the car in mind, unlike older cities that had a beginning before the automobile,” she said.

But there’s a price to pay to achieve efficient, personal and flexible transportation.

“The car in our auto-based lifestyle is very greedy,” she said. “Four lanes aren’t enough, we need six lanes; the freeway needs to be wider. We need to live in places that are next to nature, green and open, and then drive to get to our work.”

In dense cities like San Francisco, some activists are taking back the pavement. Ryan speaks admiringly of the “parklets” popping all over the City by the Bay -- parking spaces converted temporarily or permanently into miniparks with a few feet of rope and movable furniture. Some residents and business owners have even taken to feeding the parking meter while they occupy a parking space for a couple of hours. Some San Diegans have started to promote parklets here.

“This is where the design can be extremely useful and necessary,” Ryan said. “I think it’s the designer, the artist, who are the people with the ability to not only visualize something different than what’s there, but is also able to show people what’s possible.”

Noe Valley in San Francisco has seen some of its parking spaces turned into mini-parks or "parklets" in a growing movement nationally to reduce the presence of cars in streets.
-- Andres Power

Noe Valley in San Francisco has seen some of its parking spaces turned into mini-parks or "parklets" in a growing movement nationally to reduce the presence of cars in streets.